


The Will

by azcendio



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Anidala Parallels, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, For Days, Reincarnation, Slow Burn, anyway have this angst, kind of, until i lay in my grave and then some
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 21:56:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13820232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azcendio/pseuds/azcendio
Summary: Kylo Ren vows to finish what Darth Vader started, but what he forgets is that Anakin first wanted to save love.  It's not too late for Ben to do just that.





	The Will

**Author's Note:**

> so there was a voice overlap in Star Wars: Rebels s04e12 that I will never be over, and here is my tribute. Enjoy. <3

_Show me._

Sweat is her warpaint, glistening and reflecting twilight across her skin.  She has no helmet, no past with the lightsaber melded to her hands.  No shields of armor or layers of leather to guard her heart in this fight; it is wild, bare and beating through her chest- and in her eyes.  She is far too young, inexperienced, made of rags and dust, yet she is the most glorious warrior Kylo Ren has ever seen.  The most vengeful assassin who has ever held his life at the end of a blade’s edge.

She towers above him, this small, insignificant creature, a look of hatred pure and pulsating through every muscle in her body.  He can feel her rage and her sorrow swelling in the air, choking him. And her words are all around him still, seeping into the gory wound she’s cut him.   _Monster, monster, monster_ .  He can’t help but wonder if he looks the part now, can’t help but wonder how it is that she is the one to recreate him this way.  To be his becoming, and his undoing.   _This girl_ .   _Rey_ .  His equal in the light.  It is difficult to see any light beyond the glow of blue, and her face is cast so heavily in shadow that he cannot quite understand it.  Her light is dim, a faint glow at the back of her pupils, and even it is tinged in red.  In his blood, which he can feel she wants more of.  And he can’t help but wonder how it is _he_ is the one to recreate her in this way.

Or perhaps she’s been this way, all along.

Kylo Ren is torn between wanting to end her, and wanting to see her begin anew.  

The earth shudders, and cracks- undone.  Before he can decide which option would suit him best, before that girl can kill him and undo herself in the process, they are divided.  She escapes him, on the other side of a deep and hungry ravine.  She escapes him, runs to find her traitor friend.  

Yet.  Kylo Ren tastes her salt on his tongue.  Hears her heart pounding in his chest.  There, he feels the light, humming and soft.

But blood is his warpaint, dripping down his cheeks and seething like lava onto the snow.  And he knows what he has to do.

_I will finish what you started._

Sunshine is her smile, lighting and warming the corners of his room.  There is no sun where she is, the sound of rain tells him so, and there is no sun where he is.  Yet, all the same, rays stroke his cheeks and he _almost_ closes his eyes to revel in the feeling.  But Kylo’s afraid such an act would eclipse Rey, and she would not return after.  

These visits are few and fleeting, and for once she has not noticed him yet.  So, he basks in her warmth without her, or him, even knowing he needs it.   He doesn’t remember missing it, _sunshine_ , but nostalgia strikes and guts him all the same.  He thinks, perhaps, he’ll miss it when her sun sets.

He knows he will.  Only, it’s difficult admitting these things when the sun turns to him, sets her fire on him, her eyes solar flares condemning him to burn.

“ _You’re a monster_.”

He knows now why he doesn’t remember missing it, sunshine - it lures him out, reveals too much of him to the world and himself, exposes and turns red his weaknesses.  The rays on his cheeks sear into a healing wound, inflicting the obvious: he is infected, festering, and nowhere near healed.  She has made him this way, with her sight and her words and her smile.   _Her smile._

The touch of her hand.

Rey offers this, in the middle of the night- her night, his morning.  She sits across him, this lonely, dying star, a look of hope soft and lingering at the center of her.  She shines brilliant even in this moment, doused in water and tired of always being someone’s light when she is given none.  He can feel her longing and her kindness searching through the air, caressing him.  And her words are all around him, kissing the scar she’s sewn unto him.   _It’s not too late._  He can’t help but wonder if it’s true, can’t help but wonder how it is that he wants it to be.  To become wholesome, and undo the breaking of his soul.  All because of-

_This girl_ .   _Rey_ .  His equal in loneliness.  It is difficult to see her, radiance dimmed by tears, and her eyes lost in the shadows of her past- shadows he wants so deeply to cast off.  He can feel she wants him to.  Her hand reaches for him, as unarmored and bare as ever before, but no longer clawed.  She wants to _touch_ him, and he can’t help but wonder how it is _he_ is the one she wants.

Kylo removes his glove, and the air is a hazy heat around his naked skin.  It is nothing.  It is nothing to the full embrace of _the sun_ , to the touch of _her_ against him.

Her eyes flash, wide and flooding with a feeling of- of something he can’t put right to words.  She shudders, and he sees it before he feels it- a memory, a change, a _hope_ .  And then it comes: a shattering blast, a ring of fire engulfing him- her supernova; a death and rebirth so becoming of her, his eyes sting from the beauty of it.  And he knows, _he knows_ -

_I will finish what you-_

“Let go!”

Desolate is her silence.

It turns his words, his hopes to dust.  His resolve to stay the course stands a statue surrounded by ruins.  

She stands before him, this mournful sun of deserts, a look of desperation and loss streaking down her cheeks in rivers that will never reach him.  

But he reaches for her.  Begs, for her.   _Rey._  To join him.  To use her light and her touch to shape a new world, where her tears can run dry and never fall again.  He needs her to never be lonely again.   _He needs her_ , to never be lonely.

“Please.”

But she doesn’t need him.

Their lightsaber tears, shatters them both into broken pieces on the floor.  Only, she is able to put herself back together and leave.  He awakes, like so many times before, to a torn, sunless world.  He convinces himself he is healed.  He convinces himself he doesn’t miss the rays upon his cheeks.  He convinces himself he knows what he has to do.

Kylo tastes salt in the air of Crait, and it tastes of her.  Hears her heart in Luke’s chest.  There, he feels the light again, persistent and blinding.  He knows he’ll destroy it.  And _he knows_ -

“I’ll destroy her, too.”

But then he sees her, one last time, a sun setting for winter.  His sun, his equal, his girl.   **Rey**.

He can feel her rage and her sorrow swelling, swelling, suffocating- and in a moment, it’s all just gone.  Yet, all her words remain.  

_I will finish what-_

Dream? Reality?  The line between is thin when he sees her.  She smiles so often, it seems wishful to think it real.  Or selfish to think it isn’t.  If only Rey looked at him, he would know, but she never does.  It is as cruel as it is kind, because he knows what this means for him.  She has given up, and he has given in.  He longs to see her, so he does.  But she…

It affords him so much sunshine, without the fear of her turning and burning him with her anger and disappointment.  Sometimes, he even closes his eyes to bask in the sensation, to feel every particle of warmth, of _her,_ touching his skin.  Even behind his eyelids, he can see her- the afterimage of a flourishing, incandescent star.  This is when the line between dream and reality become painfully indistinguishable.  

He can imagine, in this space, his hand reaching out as it did twice before.  It is always bare, in this space, willingly vulnerable to her heat.  In this space, he wants to burn.  He touches her, as he did once before, his fingertips skimming the surface of her.  They never reach for her hands, though, for this is forbidden even in dreams.  He explores, instead, the sunspots on her shoulders and follows their trail to her face, her cheeks- no longer stained with sweat or tears -, the bridge of her nose - crinkled with laughter.  

When she laughs, her light is brightest then and sear his retinas.  He swears she is the most luminous star in the galaxy.  He wants her to know this, but can never say it- even in this space between dream and reality.

Dream: he awakes beside her, Snoke’s throne behind them, the broken lightsaber between them.  He does not look at the throne.  He does not think of Snoke, or his pain, or his panic.  He thinks only, looks only at her.  At the center of his heart, waking, worried only for a moment before she smiles at the touch of his hand on her cheek.  He is a fool, but he is sorry.  She forgives.

Reality: He is awake across from her, a battlefield between them.  He _is_ a fool.  He _is_ sorry, but it is too late.  And does she forgive?  Her face and eyes, lit by that fateful lightsaber, are determined to hide the answer from him.

Sweat is still her warpaint, still glistening and reflecting the sky across her skin.  Still no helmet to guard her mind, no shields to hide her heart.  She is still too young to be on a battlefield but, under the rags and dust, she is made of steel and gold.  She is still the most glorious warrior he has ever seen.  If she is to be the blade that cuts him down, it is a blade he welcomes.  It is a blade he sharpened.

Her blade wavers, and he wonders if she can feel it, feel him.  His regret and longing is palpable in the air, thick in his lungs and heart.  He wonders when exactly his dreams and reality got so far apart to come to this.  To regretting his steps, and longing to step forward, to walk towards her.  He can’t help but want to, when still her words make home in his head:

_Monster. It’s not too late. I’ll help you. Ben._

And all at once, he can feel her.  He can feel her, all of her, swelling, swelling, _singing_ across the space between them, so vast and abysmal but shrinking, going back through time, to the moment of explosion- and through all that time and space, she’d been feeling:

_Love._

His becoming, and his undoing.  

“I surrender,” Ben says.  It’s a whisper beneath the deafening death shuddering through him, but Rey hears him and that’s all that matters.  She isn’t the only one, of course, but she’s the one his eyes stay steadily locked onto, like a beacon.  He holds on through the havoc, and he can take dying because he sees himself in her eyes.  As he is, always been, all collapsing into one point.

As he takes a step towards her, there is a flash of something in her eyes- of a red light, there and gone- and a crack, and a rupture he has felt once before.  There is blood, hot and spreading from his chest, and he thinks perhaps his heart has exploded from the strain of change.  But then there are more flashes and cracks, and he’s falling to the ground before he can truly decide if he should retaliate, or find out who shot him (Hux, of course, it had to be).  

This is not how he is supposed to die.  He feels this in the very marrow of his bones, feels it cried out through the force between he and-

Rey.

In the chaos, they are divided.  There are blurred (fighting, dying) bodies, a maelstrom of colliding worlds between them.  Yet, her face remains in focus- the sun at the center of it all.  He clings onto the sight of her hellfire, her brilliant devotion, her tenderness and force.  He tastes salt on his tongue, and its hers.  He hears her heart slamming into his, willing it to keep going.  He wants it to, for her.  But… He feels the light, humming and soft, pulling him close.  He knows what he has to do, but he doesn’t know if he has the strength to do it.

_I will finish-_

Nothing.  Is what he is.  There is nothing outside of him, or of him.  He feels himself floating, in the space between spaces, and if he has eyes here they open to nothing.  Or at least, that is what he thinks and feels in that moment.  Before a new sensation waves through him, whatever and wherever he is in death: a balance.  A balance that lets him float, rather than sink.  There is an ebb and a flow, and a gentleness all around him.  And it is quiet, for the first time in a long time.  It is truly, peacefully quiet.

Only, this is just a moment, and he likens it to the moment you first fall into water and it fills your ears.  There is a stillness before the water speaks.  

_Ben_ , it speaks, and he knows its voice.  He loves this voice, her voice.  If it is to be his only companion, he would be content to float with it infinitely.

It continues to speak with her voice, saying only his name as though to remind him who he is, when it feels as though he is nothing in all this space.   _Ben,_ she reminds him, again and again until the name sounds natural again.  Until it is one he can hear in his own voice if he chose ever to speak, or if he could.

Though he cannot speak, sensations beside sound come to him.  

Slowly, Ben feels warmth.  He feels it on the outline of eyelids, cheekbones and nose.  He can almost see it, a shadowed halo of yellow and red.  

Gradually, Ben feels the touch of a hand, _her_ hand, just beside where his eyes should be.  There’s a tickle of hair, and the smell of earth and ash, and something… _green_.

_“Ben, please.”_

He tastes salt.  Something wet is trickling between his lips, to his tongue.

He sees her, his sun up close, her eyes so green he wonders how they can be so _alive_.

How can he be-

“Ben,” Rey breathes, and he is alive, in her arms, and everything is so very loud.  But the throb of her heart at his ear drowns out the sounds of war, and her embrace- oh, _her embrace_ blinds him to all the rest.

She is all around him, his love, and he can feel every emotion in the spectrum- the light, the dark, the colors and grey in between.  It frightens him still, and he is bleeding.  But, he is healing, and so is she.  The universe has finished shattering.  In time, he feels it too will heal.

It begins now.

Rey pulls away from him, and he determines not to cry out in pain.  For the look in her eyes is enough to swallow his cry whole.  She lifts him up, for there is a battlefield they must cross.  Together.

“Stay close to me,” Rey orders, and Ben can only nod, and smile.

_I will._


End file.
